I've always been much more of a producer than a consumer. In music, I preferred to create or play my own far more than I enjoyed listening. The same is true for poetry as well, and in the past couple of years has been true of board games, too: I prefer to craft my own. It's not that I believe my own work to be better than anyone else's; rather, I'm usually very skeptical about my own work. But the process of creating--the work and satisfaction of turning something over and over in my head, perfecting the unfinished corners, tucking in the inefficiencies...ah. That gets me. I like that.
The same is less true of non-poetic writing, especially fiction. I do love to turn a phrase, but writing is so much work. I'd rather read someone else's hard-fought 250 pages than wrench my own way through the task of pulling a story down to earth. That said, I enjoy the cheap words of expository writing (like this). It affords me the pleasure of creating, without the work of slaving my creativity to a longer, oppressively structured narrative. I'm not moving the story along, here. This is the story.What's curious to me is that my life has been, to this point, neatly divided between the poetic, musical, creative side (The Artist), the analytic, scholastic, working side (The Professional), and the personable, religious, social side (The Relative). Years ago, I broke these three into Poetry, History, and the Sea; I still think that concept offers some useful parallels. That much isn't too curious, though; lots of people have different aspects of their personality, different expressions of themselves.
The curious part, to me, is that all three are, for me, more or less mutually repulsive. The Artist is a dark soul, overly emotive; the others think him an idiot hippie, or embarrassingly uncensored. Meanwhile, The Artist thinks the Professional is a horribly self-important, soulless drone, and The Relative is a simpering people-pleaser. The Professional and The Relative meet at parties from time to time, but never talk; we have nothing in common, except to describe the other in our own respective circles.
And, appropriately, the three have (almost entirely) different circles of relationships. The Professional has friends at work who do not bleed into other realms; The Relative has family, a wife and kid, friends at church--all of whom are, also, carefully constrained to their own arenas. The Artist used to have several bands, and at one point had a small following in the writing world, but has since lost both, whether to geography or silence; he's a wandering, lonely soul these days.
It struck me today how uncomfortable I am with any of the three pools of Myself overlapping. I suppose I should have no legitimate objection to my work colleagues reading my poetry--but all the same, the very thought makes me uncomfortable and I would go out of my way to avoid it. The same is true for family at work, or the reverse. I'm fascinated by the thought that writers in the past may have had the same duplicitous existence, hiding their writing selves from their professional or family selves, and when we gaze back at an author through his or her own written words, we then emerge with a very discolored view.
At the same time, I diagnose my own behavior here as considerably unhealthy. Creativity as catharsis for my other two Selves is normal enough, I suppose, but I rather think I should be more integrated overall. I get the impression that many other people are more integrated--but, to admit my own snide arrogance, I confess that I credit others' well-balanced personhoods to their own shallow lack of creativity. It's not hard to be well integrated when your three parts consist of TV Self, Work Self, and Sleeping Self.
Enough. I'm sure you get the point, whoever you are. This is a dark and only partial catharsis, here, and mostly unrecognizable as myself. Don't be deceived.
